The Protégé Read online

  Gillette could see it was all just beginning to sink in. Stiles had grown up dirt poor in Harlem, and now he was about to make five million dollars. More money than he probably could have dreamed of as a kid. But Gillette didn’t want there to be any appearance of impropriety, either. They’d have to go through all the normal due diligence. “As part of the deal, you’ll sign a noncompete.”

  “A what?”

  “A noncompetition agreement. It’ll stipulate that you can’t start, or work for, another personal security company for at least five years.”

  “Well, I—”

  “And you’ll sign all the normal reps and warranties as part of the purchase agreement.”

  “The normal whats?”

  “Representations and warranties. Promises that you alone have the power to sell the company and that you’ve been a good corporate citizen while you owned it. Specifically, that you’re the only owner of QS stock and, if you’re not, that the others can’t block you, that you’ve paid all your corporate and personal taxes, and that you don’t have any lawsuits pending against you. Things like that. If it turns out some of those things aren’t accurate, and I find out about it after we do the deal, you’ll owe me my money back and then some.”

  “So, I’m gonna need a lawyer,” Stiles said glumly.

  “It’s all standard stuff in the deal business.”

  “I don’t know deals, I know personal security and investigations.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “You wouldn’t take advantage of me, Chris.”

  Gillette grinned. “Sure I would. It’s what I do. That’s why you’re going to get a lawyer.” He could see Stiles was struggling, unsure of himself in this situation but trying to maintain his signature cool. Stiles didn’t want to insult the man who was going to make him rich, but he’d sacrificed and risked a great deal to get QS where it was now, and he wasn’t going to throw caution out the window for anyone. “I’d never take advantage of you, Quentin,” Gillette said seriously. “You’ll get your five million, and you’ll never have to pay me back anything. Unless you lie to me, and we both know you’d never do that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ll get the lawyers started on the documents. We should have everything finished up in thirty days, okay?”

  Stiles nodded deliberately. “Thanks, Chris. This is all pretty amazing.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ve worked hard, you deserve it. Most people fail where you’ve prospered.” Gillette could see Stiles appreciated that someone else understood how much sacrifice it had taken to make QS successful. Just as he appreciated Stiles understanding how isolated he felt sometimes as chairman of Everest. It was one of the reasons they’d gotten so close. Each took the time to understand the other’s situation.

  Stiles cut another piece of steak and put it in his mouth. “How did your meeting with Landry go?”

  “The guy tried to back me off on the casino.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I had a feeling he’d try that,” Gillette said, folding his napkin. “I figured the owners agreed to the casino initially to get the four hundred and fifty million, then thought they could jerk it away once they gave us the franchise. You know, they thought I’d be so happy to be an NFL owner, I’d do anything they wanted after the fact.”

  “What tipped you off that they’d try the bait and switch?”

  “I figured they knew the Mafia was still active out there, and I know they don’t want any chance that the same people who own one of their franchises would be tempted to get in bed with organized crime. That’s one of the last things they want to see splashed across the front page of The New York Times.”

  “Why did you think they were on to the Mob in Vegas?” Stiles asked.

  “You were. I figured if you knew, they must.”

  Stiles’s expression sagged. “You think their people are better than mine?”

  “That’s a fucking joke. You figured it out in a few hours, so I figured they could do it in a few months.” Gillette pulled out his Blackberry and scrolled through his e-mails. “You find out anything more about what’s going on? Anything specific about what we’re likely to run into?”

  Stiles nodded and leaned forward in his chair, motioning for Gillette to do the same.

  “What is it?” Gillette asked, putting his elbows on the table and looking around suspiciously.

  “Hey, this is Sparks Steak House,” Stiles said quietly.

  “Yep. Best steak place in Manhattan. So what?”

  “There’s probably Mob guys in here right now,” Stiles said, looking around.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Hey, don’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “John Gotti shot Paul Castellano dead on the steps of this place one night as Castellano was coming in to eat dinner. Castellano was godfather of the Gambino family. Ultimately, Gotti became don of the Gambinos. He used to eat here, too. Before the feds finally took Gotti down and sent him away for life.” Stiles glanced around at a few tables. “But, like we all know, you take one wiseguy down and a new one takes his place, so I figure the walls here have ears.”

  Gillette nodded. “Yeah, but any ears in this place probably belong to the feds. If any Mob guy talked business in this place, he’d probably be killed by his own family before the feds could get to him.”

  “But they can hear what we’re talking about if they’re around, and I figure you don’t want that.” Stiles glanced at one table in particular, four tough-looking guys dressed in silk suits.

  Gillette followed Stiles’s glance. “Okay,” he said quietly, “what do you have?”

  “There’s three families active in Vegas right now,” Stiles answered. “Branches of the Chicago Treviso and Barducci families are there, but they’re small-time. Penny-ante stuff, mostly, like retail ‘protection.’ They target off-the-strip restaurants and shops owned by foreigners who can’t go to the authorities for help because most of their workers are illegal aliens and they haven’t paid FICA in years. Easy pickings for extortionists who kill somebody every once in a while just to make a statement, whether he pays his arm-twist money or not. They’ve been targeting mainly Asians, from what I’m hearing. So, of course, the Asian Mobs see an opportunity and they’re moving in to ‘protect’ their people. Problem is, those guys are worse than Italians. They charge more and kill for less.” Stiles paused for a moment. “The family you need to watch out for in Vegas is the Carbone family. They’re out of New York, and they’ve got all the local construction companies tied up, so you got to make certain everyone wants to work hard all the time. If you try to bring someone in from the outside who doesn’t gouge you for the extra incentive, you find out your equipment breaks down real often. They’re also close to the gaming commission and the other state regulators involved with the gambling industry, so you’ll run into them whenever you need licenses and approvals. Don’t believe the local city officials who tell you everything’s clean. It isn’t.”

  “It’s all like you thought.”

  “Yeah, but now two other sources have confirmed it. People I trust.”

  “How did you find out this stuff, Quentin? Who did you talk to?”

  Stiles shook his head. “Don’t ask.”

  “Come on,” Gillette pushed.

  “Before I started QS, I wasn’t just with the Army Rangers and the Secret Service. I worked in another area of the government, too. We had dealings with some of these people.”

  “What area was it?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Quentin, I—”

  “Don’t push it, Chris. Really.”

  Gillette took a deep breath. “So, if I don’t play ball with the Carbones, I’ll have problems with the construction of both the stadium and the casino, and I might be denied the ability to operate the casino when it’s ready to open.”

  “Exactly. But there are . . . consulting firms that can take care of all that f
or you.” Stiles smirked. “If you get my drift. You pay them a flat fee for something called ‘general business services,’ and they make the payoffs for you. They skim a little off the top, but you don’t get your hands dirty and they make sure you don’t have any . . . interruptions.”

  “I bet it isn’t just a little off the top, either.”

  “It’s not as bad as you think. Over time, markets get efficient. This one’s no different. There’s enough of those firms now that the skim isn’t outrageous.”

  “The problem is,” Gillette explained, “I want to bring in a construction group from the outside. There aren’t any based in Vegas that can handle both jobs at the same time and get them done as fast as I want.”

  “I think as long as you hire one of these consulting firms, it doesn’t matter that much. Might be a little more expensive, but as long as the Carbones get their pound of flesh, they don’t care if you use someone outside.”

  Gillette brightened. “Good, then talk to a few of them for me. Are they all out in Las Vegas?”

  “The ones you want to deal with.”

  “I’m going out there soon. Do phone interviews with the best ones and narrow it down to two, then we’ll meet with them while I’m in town.”

  “Got it.”

  Gillette took another drink of water. “Some of these other New York crime families are in the paper every week. Somebody’s being arrested for something, but I’ve never heard much about the Carbones.”

  “They’re run by a guy named Joseph Celino who hates publicity as much as you do.”

  “Get some more on them from your contacts, will you? As much as you can. Specifically on Celino.”

  “Sure, sure.” Stiles pushed his plate away, a few bites of the steak uneaten. “Man,” he said loudly, “that wouldn’t have happened a year ago. Wasting food like that, I mean. Hell, I would have had seconds.”

  “Like you said, it’ll take a while.” Gillette slipped the Blackberry back into his pocket. “Listen, Friday morning you and I are going to Washington. Then, in the afternoon, we’re going to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to meet with the mayor of a small town down there.”

  “You’re really going to follow up with those people in D.C.?”

  There was no choice. Gillette had a gut feeling that Daniel Ganze really did know something about his father, and he wasn’t going to miss even the slightest opportunity to find out what had happened to that plane sixteen years ago. “I’m going to meet with them at least once more,” he replied. “I don’t think I’ve got anything to lose doing that. Just the time if it turns out to be a dead end.”

  “I hope it’s just the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you need to be careful.”

  “Always, and I’ll have you there.”

  “Why the meeting with the mayor?” Stiles asked.

  Gillette liked the fact that Stiles recognized when he didn’t want to talk about something. If only most people he knew understood him so well. “She’s getting in the way of a store Discount America is trying to build in her town, stirring up the natives. She’s calling people in other towns, too. We can’t have that.”

  “You going to bring her up to New York for a big, all-expenses-paid weekend? Turn on the Gillette charm at some swanky dinner? Make her an offer she can’t refuse?” Stiles smiled. “If I know you, you’ll have her begging you to bring that store to her town by the time the weekend’s over.”

  “I wish.” It wasn’t going to be that easy—not according to Harry Stein, anyway. “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got this ground-breaking ceremony for the new hospital wing we’re building at St. Christopher’s,” he explained, standing. “Why don’t you come with me? We can talk more about the QS deal on the way over. It would probably help for me to let you in on all the things to expect when you sell your business. There’s more to it than you think.”

  “Sure, and thanks for lunch.”

  Gillette grinned as he pushed in his chair. “Lunch is on you, pal. You’re about to bank five large. You can afford it.”

  BOYD LOOKED UP from his desk when he heard the rap on the door. “What is it, Daniel?”

  “I did some checking on that Miles Whitman situation,” Ganze replied, moving into the office. “Called over to Justice to see what was what.”

  Boyd put down the report he’d been working on. “And?”

  “They’re not as stupid as we thought.”

  “What do you mean?” Boyd asked.

  “It’s taken them some time, but they’ve started to figure out that Whitman must have had help hiding his forty million. It’s hard to hide that big a money transfer these days with the way banks have to report transactions.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “They’ve put out feelers to several different agencies, including the right one. It could take them a few days, maybe even a week, to run it high enough up the flagpole to get an answer, but they’ll get a bite if they have information to trade. Then we’re screwed.”

  “We need this.”

  “I know.”

  Boyd groaned and rubbed his eyes. “Okay, let’s move.”

  GILLETTE STOOD behind a raised podium erected in a field beside St. Christopher’s Memorial Hospital on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a beautiful early fall afternoon, the sky a deep blue, the air crisp, the summer humidity gone. Football weather, Gillette thought as he looked out over the hundred invited guests. Several of the hospital executive officers and board members had already stepped to the microphone to thank him for his personal generosity, and it was his turn to say a few words, which included reminding everyone that it was Everest Capital making the ten-million-dollar donation, not him.

  He said a few more things—he hoped the new wing could make a difference to more than a few people’s lives, hoped the research lab the wing would include could produce results, and assured the hospital executives that Everest Capital would continue to support them in the future with their new projects. Gillette was close to several of the hospital executives—people he’d dealt with for years—so he knew the money would be used for the right purposes and not siphoned off into some leech’s pocket. He was generous with money he controlled, but careful. Because he knew how easily money could fall into the wrong hands. It was like water, always following the path of least resistance.

  As Gillette stepped down from the podium, one of the construction company’s representatives moved forward with a gold shovel Gillette would use for the ceremonial ground breaking and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” Gillette said.

  The man smiled from beneath his yellow hard hat, not letting go of the shovel right away.

  “What is it?” Gillette asked.

  “We’re looking forward to having you in Las Vegas, Mr. Gillette,” the man said quietly. “For everybody’s sake, go with the flow when you get there. Make things easy.” His smile faded. “Or we can make them very hard.”

  5

  DAVID WRIGHT drew back the pool cue, hesitated for a moment as he aimed, then struck the white ball hard. A tiny puff of blue chalk flew in the air, and the white ball raced across the table and careered into the seven, sending it toward the far corner pocket. But it skidded against the rail just in front of the pocket and bounced left, then rolled back almost a foot. “Damn it!”

  “Too hard,” Gillette observed, checking out the table as the seven came to rest. The ten was all he had to drop—Wright still had five balls on the table. If he knocked the ten in just right, he could set himself up perfectly for the eight and the match would be over. Three games for him—none for Wright.

  “Way too hard,” Stiles agreed. He was leaning against the wall beside the mahogany cue stand, sipping the iced tea Debbie had brought him.

  “I don’t need any coaching from the cheap seats,” Wright snapped.

  Stiles laughed. “Just trying to help, my man. I want to see your boss go down as bad as you do. He tells me he’s
never been beaten on this table.” He winked at Gillette when Wright wasn’t looking. “I get tired of hearing how good he is.”

  “Yeah, well, I almost beat him a couple of times, so screw you.”

  Wright and Stiles had just met, but Wright didn’t care about first impressions, Gillette knew. He cared about winning.

  “Why don’t you play him,” Wright said, gesturing at Stiles.

  “I will when he’s done with you,” Stiles answered. “Which looks like it’ll be in about thirty seconds, thanks to that last sorry-ass shot of yours. I thought Chris told me you had game.”

  Wright glared at Stiles. “Hey, you can—”

  “Enough,” Gillette interrupted, hiding a grin. He dropped the ten and eight quickly, then straightened up. “Looks like Quentin was wrong,” he said. “Only took fifteen seconds.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Rack ’em, David,” Gillette ordered. He picked up a bottled water off the table in front of the cue stand and took several swallows. “You and Quentin are going to play first,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “One game, then the winner gets me. We’re going to settle who’s best right now with a little tournament, but it’s my table so I get a first-round bye.”

  “What’s he doing here, anyway?” Wright grumbled, gathering the balls into the rack.

  “Quentin’s in charge of my personal security.”

  “I thought we had a company doing that.”

  “Right, QS. Quentin Stiles. He’s the one who got shot in Mississippi last fall. He’s the one who saved my life down there.”

  Wright stopped gathering the balls and looked over at Stiles. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.”

  Gillette had introduced Stiles to Wright only by his first name.

  “I didn’t put two and two together,” Wright continued. “God, you’re a legend around here.” He hesitated. “No offense.”

  Stiles pulled a stick from the cue stand. “None taken. I got skin like a rhino.”

  Gillette sat at the table as Stiles prepared to break. “McGuire and Company is going to buy QS, and Quentin’s going to join us at Everest when the deal’s done. Which should be in about thirty days. I’m going to propose that he become a special partner at that time. Not a full partner like Faraday and me, but he’s going to have some of the same privileges.”